


Things Still Unsaid

by manta_rays_on_gallifrey



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (Big Finish Audio)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-13
Updated: 2014-04-13
Packaged: 2018-01-19 04:58:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,160
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1456342
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/manta_rays_on_gallifrey/pseuds/manta_rays_on_gallifrey
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When the unthinkable happens, the Doctor is forced to confront some of his ghosts, quite literally. Missing scene from "The Last."</p>
            </blockquote>





	Things Still Unsaid

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first real fic of all time so if you have a moment to say what you think/leave some advice please do!

The Doctor peered into the uncovered panel of the control deck, taking in the candy colored wires and complicated array of connections. It would look terribly complicated, but as it happened the structure was not dissimilar to that of the old engines he used to tinker with back on Gallifrey when he was a mere 50 years old. Fixing the rocket’s problems would be relatively easy, making it actually space worthy, perhaps a bit harder. The stakes were about as high as was normal, for him. The planet was bursting apart at the seems and he knew if he didn’t work quickly he and everyone left would die, not to mention C’rizz… and Charley.

The Doctor sighed. He could tell Charley didn’t believe him when he said her spine could still be repaired. He could see it in her eyes, that hopelessness, that fear. She smiled and said, “Oh yes I’m all right, Doctor” but inside he knew she was screaming. His Edwardian adventuress, unable to even walk, much less explore or run or get into trouble, as she was so apt at doing.

Well, even if she didn’t, he still held out hope. Back home in his universe all it would take would be quick hop to Gallifrey and they would have been able to bring her back from the brink of death itself. There must be at least one race in this entire universe with technology like that and he knew he wouldn’t ever stop until he found it.

As if summoned by his thoughts he heard Charley murmur, “Doctor,” from somewhere behind him.

“Charley, could you hand me that soldering iron, it’s jus-“ No, she couldn’t. She was paralyzed from the neck down, but besides that she was a good few miles away in the bunker with C’rizz and everyone else.

“Charley? Minister Voss?” he called out. “Must be tired. Starting to imagine things. Got to get this finished or we’ll be too late,” he reasoned. He tried not to let his mind wander to C’rizz, shouting at ghosts as real to him as this panel was to the Doctor.  
“Doctor, it’s all right,” Charley’s voice came again, quiet and gentle.

“Charley, is that you?” He spun around, searching.

Minister Voss stomped into view, “You called me, Doctor?” The Doctor leaped up. The voice had definitely been Charley and besides madness, there was only one explanation… and it sent hot knives through his hearts merely considering it.

“Charley, something’s happened to Charley!” he yelled, making for the external door. His hearts pounded in his chest. If something had happened to her after all this, after all they had been through, he knew he would never survive.

“What about the rocket?” Minister Voss cried after him.

“Damn the rocket!” the Doctor yelled back, wrenching the door open and running out. The bare, desolate landscape blurred around him as he tore through the destroyed city. He could barely focus on ground beneath him, pockmarked and strewn with debris as it was. All there was Charley, lying in her hospital bed, helpless, paralyzed, perfectly still.

“Doctor,” her voice came again from next to him. She couldn’t be there. He knew she couldn’t. Perhaps he really was going mad. This wouldn’t be the first time.

“Doctor, please stop. I know you can hear me. Please, look at me.”

“You can’t be here, Charley. You’re back in the bunker with C’rizz. Safe and sound. It’s me. I’m going insane, probably. Little wonder considering I’ve been wrenched from my universe and from time itself. The effects were bound to catch up to me eventually.” He didn’t slow.

“You know that’s not true, Doctor. Please, it’s all right. Just stop and look. I’m right here.” The Doctor slowed and then stopped altogether. Beside him was Charley, staring at him apprehensively. She was wearing the same clothes as back at the bunker and her blonde hair curled lightly around her face. And she was standing.

“Charley, your spine was broken. How can you be standing? For that matter how can you be out here at all?”

“Oh Doctor don’t play dumb with me, I can tell when you are. My spine is still broken, but it hardly matters anymore does it?” she chuckled weakly.

“What do you-,“ the Doctor began.

“I’m dead. And I don’t mean dead but alive with memories of both. You aren’t going to be able to carry me off on the back of a vortisaur this time. No, this time I’m definitely dead, don’t you think?”

“Charley, I can’t accept that. You know I can’t. I’ve saved you before and I’ll do it again. And…and and you’ve saved me a hundred times over. We’ll get out of this together and together we’ll go onto whatever comes next. We’ll get out of this, we always do. We have to.”

She smiled, tears appearing at the corners of her eyes. “Take my hand, Doctor,” she offered it out to him. After a moment of hesitation he reached out to take it but felt nothing but air. He stepped forward as if to embrace her and she appeared on the other side of him, watching with a small smile and sympathetic eyes. He turned back to face her.

“No Charley, no. This isn’t how it was meant to be. We were going to be together. We were going to go so far and see so much. How could this have happened?” His voice grew louder until he was shouting, his face contorting in anger as the realization of what was happening came over him. He paused, “How did it happen? I mean you were paralyzed when I left you but not dying. Who or what did this to you?”

The gentle look vanished from Charley’s face and she drew back, hugging her arms to her chest. “It really wasn’t pleasant. I’d rather not think about it if you don’t mind. I was so helpless. I couldn’t move, I couldn’t do anything but yell.” She shivered. “Oh it was horrible, don’t make me think about that.” Tears threatened to spill out onto her cheeks.

“Of course you don’t have to, but couldn’t you tell me if someone did this to you?” the Doctor responded more gently.  
“No, I think I’d better not. I almost feel like I’m not allowed. Maybe whatever’s allowing me to be here is controlling what I can and can’t do.”

“Yes I think you’re probably right. But when have you ever been one to follow rules, Charlotte Pollard?” He tried a half-smile.

She returned the smile. “All the same, I think it would be better to let this play out as it will. I don’t think I have a choice in this matter.”

“You know,” the Doctor continued, “for a girl who nearly ripped apart the web of time to stay alive last time, you seem strangely accepting of your fate now.”

Charley gave an indignant huff, “I did not rip apart the web of time. That was all your doing and you know it.” She paused, “I don’t know. I was afraid when I was dying. I didn’t want to, but now that I have I just don’t seem to be worried about myself anymore. I’m worried about you and C’rizz of course, but I don’t feel any fear or apprehension about,” she stole a glance at the Doctor, “anything else.” She smiled cheekily and continued, “If I could kiss you right now…”

The Doctor chuckled. “Did you really come back to flirt? I mean, not everyone who dies comes back or we’d both be knee deep in ghosts.”

“Honestly,” Charley grew serious again and looked into the Doctor’s eyes, “I couldn’t leave without a proper goodbye. I didn’t want to; after all we’ve been through, after all you’ve meant to me. I couldn’t leave without seeing you again. There’s too many things left unsaid between us.” The Doctor grimaced and looked down.

“I’m surprised you’d want to, see me again I mean. After all I’m the reason you’re dead and lying with a broken spine so far away from your world. You’re supposed to be out having adventures and scrapes with danger and living. Living life to the full, but instead you’re here, so far from everything important to you. How can you not loathe me?” He turned away.

“Doctor, how can you think that? I had to let go of Earth and ‘everything important to me’ a long time ago. I died remember? Well not really, not like this, but for all intents and purposes I died in 1930 in an airship that fell to the Earth and exploded. I’d long ago given up hope of seeing my family again, but I could live with that because I had you. You became my everything. Can’t you understand that?”

Words stuck in the Doctor’s throat as he struggled for a response. Charley took his silence as a sign to continue, “Look, it hardly matters does it? I’m where I am now and that’s all there is to it. And please don’t blame yourself anymore. I chose to come with you to this universe; I chose to come with you back in France in 1930. I am here through my decisions alone. There’s nothing you could do and nothing you can do and I suppose,” she took a shuddering breath, “that’s that.”

She made a move to lift his chin up, to bring him back to her, but her hand passed through him like vapor and she stepped back, tears in her eyes. “Please say something, Doctor.”

“I can’t. What should I say to you? That I’m sorry? That I wish I had never brought you along? ‘Goodbye, Charley, it’s been fun?’ What do you say to your best friend when any word could be the last they hear? What can I possibly say that can convey what you’ve meant to me, how without you I can’t imagine going on through this universe for another day, much less another eternity? What do I say?”

“How about ‘I love you?’”

The Doctor sighed. It always seemed to come back to this is one phrase. “I love you.” Three simple words that somehow always meant so much more. Did he love Charley? Of course he did. He’d wanted her to travel with him through time and space forever, as a companion and perhaps more, but saying those words always made the Doctor feel like he was crossing into a new place from which there was no return, a place that had the potential to be as destructive and dangerous as this divergent universe. Except, the Doctor supposed, that place didn’t really exist anymore. It had ceased to exist the moment Charley died so really there was nothing left to be afraid of.

“Alright, yes I love you. Of course I love you. You were my everything too; you were the only thing I have left and it was enough. But now that I don’t even have you, what am I to do, Charley? What can I do?”

She looked down, no longer meeting his eyes.

“You don’t know what to say, do you? No, they never do. Do you know what it does to me to watch you all leave? It breaks my hearts.”

“Doctor, that’s not fair!”

“No, it’s not fair, but it’s my life, a never-ending string of goodbyes.”

“I’m sorry, Doctor. I would have stayed with you forever; you know that don’t you? I love you and I never would have left you by choice, ever.”

“I know, Charley, I know. And I’m sorry can’t that have that future. I wish we could have.”

“I do too.”

Charley and the Doctor smiled hesitantly but sadly, each imaging the things that would never be. Charley could no longer stop her tears and they coursed down her cheeks in huge wet tracks and disappeared before they hit the ground.

“I’m going to miss you, Doctor. I don’t know how long I have, but I want you to know that I will always love you and I hope you will remember me.”

The Doctor once again found himself at a loss for words. “I…I have to get back to the bunker,” he finally said. “Will you come with me till then? Thinking about what’s waiting for me there, I don’t know if I can make it by myself.”

“Of course I will, Doctor. I’ll stay as long as I can.” She stepped forward and brought her lips to his for an instant and in that moment, though neither could feel the other’s touch, they both understood all the love and longing and sadness that came with it. After that last small eternity, Charley drew back and turned back towards the bunker where the future waited. The Doctor followed and together they began to walk down the long, desolate road, treasuring the very last seconds of time they could have together.


End file.
